As promised on Facebook, here are some boring pictures and videos I took on Road-Trip-2011-Part-01.

Last Friday Natalie and I made a trip out to Palm Desert, CA to pick up a car and drive it back. The trip out was… a little long. But with some nice scenery. Once again T-Mobile failed me. From Jerome to the CA border I had absolutely NO service. The driver had 3G with VZW the whole time, even in the mountains. Perfect.

BUT, we had a pretty good time on this trip. Saw some stuff we hadn’t seen before and enjoyed some great refried beans, and awesome fish tacos! enjoy:

I took a couple of pictures and some short, boring, videos on the way. Check out the pictures on a map, by following this link.

Most of our drive to Palm Desert looked like this.

This was my view for the majority of the ride out. Vast stretches of grass and a few trees.

For Context: This post is the second in a series which talks about my experiences of the last year, my illness, and subsequent hospitalization and recovery. There is a LOT of stuff that I simply don’t know. Things happened that I was not aware of at the time. I will NOT try to explain the illness too much, as I want this to be about what I experienced, and not a report on my health, nor a treatise on the health care industry. This is more or less a list of things that happened, and not a narrative story. Someday maybe I will get to write that. This post is a summary of events from around 12/9 to around 12/15/2009.

What is Real?

“If real is what you can feel, smell, taste, and see, then ‘real’ is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain.” – Morpheus, The Matrix (1999)

I’m honestly not sure these days, how much of what I remember was real, and what was a hallucination. I had a lot of dreams about what was happening to me. For a while I was convinced that I was captured or kidnapped. There were ‘Doctors’ in my dreams, and they were usually good guys who wanted to help me but simply couldn’t. They couldn’t let me go. That’s all that I wanted. I wanted to go home. I thought about my wife, our son, and the baby that was on the way, and all I wanted was to get back to them.

Sometimes I thought it was Al–Qaeda, sometimes it was aliens, sometimes it was the ‘Shadow Government.’ What I couldn’t figure out though, was what they wanted from me. I kept telling them that there was no reason to hold me hostage. “There’s no money. No one can give you money for me,” I kept telling them. But they wouldn’t listen. They never listened.

I did try to escape, and almost made it a couple of times. Although, where would I have gone? I can remember when they started putting the ‘mittens’ on me. They were huge wrapped pads on my hands that were supposed to keep me from pulling my wires and tubes out. They started with plain Velcro, but I was able to pull that off with my teeth. Then they wrapped them with tape. And I think they ended up doing something even more drastic, but I can’t remember. Pretty sure that I was tied down at one point.

I had some ideas here, and now I can’t seem to remember any of them. Man, what the heck happened? I can think of 50 good ideas for a post while I’m driving, but as soon as i get to a pen, can’t remember. ah… anyways,

Here are 3 decent Romantic Comedies that we watched recently, and liked a lot:

When in Rome

Lighthearted Romantic Comedy. Girl steals coins from fountain and ends up cursed with too many admirers (who are almost all from New York City for some reason). She fights them off with a stick until they all come together to help her win love. Nice. Quite hilarious at times.

The Ugly Truth

Badly Directed Romantic Comedy. Decent, but with so many other great/good ones out there, leave it on the shelf or in your queue for a time when you get really bored. The girl from Knocked Up and the guy from 300 have good chemistry and the script was funny, it just didn’t have the right flow. I always blame direction and editing for these issues.

The Proposal

Funny Romantic Comedy. Bullock and Reynolds are great, and I’d like to see them do some more together. This one starts out a bit slow and unsteady, but momentum builds up and within the first 15-20 minutes finds its pace and keeps it. Bullock was nominated for a Golden Globe on this one, and she earned it. Just the scene with her and Betty White in the woods should have won her the award…

I shall be participating in the WordPress.com Post a Day Challenge for 2011. It’s kind of important to me that i do something like this every day. It was hard in 2010 due to all the excitement and weird stuff that happened [no matter how many promises I made myself about it]. I managed for almost a month to post a picture/doodle/note every day, and something a little longer every week. I can continue that proud tradition, right?

It is important to me that I do something creative every day. It’s only the 4th already, so i can catch up easily. my break from the blog-o-sphere is over.

This is only one of my resolutions this year. there will be more to follow. Great things on the horizon.

-Se7en/GTD

–M.A.W.G.

[UPDATE 1/11/11: Yeah, that didn’t really work out. Lets try for a weekly, and maybe we’ll get a couple. Theres just not enough going on in my brain right now. Good luck to all the others doing theirs… GTD]